The Crisis after Forty Years

Abstract

ALTHOUGH HANS BARON first discussed his conception of in 1925, it was only with the publication of The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance in 1955 that he revealed the full significance of what he believed to have been a fundamental change in the nature of Italian humanism occurring in the years immediately after 1400.1 In this work, Baron endeavored to establish his thesis that a sharp break existed between Italian humanism of the fourteenth and that of the fifteenth century. Fourteenth-century Italian humanists had been literary and largely apolitical. Basically loyal to medieval beliefs that monarchy was the best form of government, they preferred the contemplative to the active life and considered Roman history as culminating in the rule of Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus. In the opening years of the fifteenth century, however, the young Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni, originally of Arezzo, revived the ancient Roman republican concept that any form of government short of popular rule was tyrannical, and he insisted that while political freedom stimulates the creative and moral powers of the individual, so the loss of political freedom destroys those powers. Intimately associated with the revival of republicanism was Bruni's insistence that the active life of the citizen was superior to the life of withdrawal and contemplation, and that the decline of the Roman Empire began with the destruction of republican freedom by Caesar and Augustus. Finally, whereas the fourteenth-century humanists looked back on antiquity with melancoly as an age never to be revived, Bruni considered antiquity the source of inspiration for works in contemporary vernacular languages that rivaled ancient Latin literature. For Baron, these conceptions of civic humanism, first created in early fifteenth-